


Tick Tick Tock

by epicionly



Series: All the King's Men [2]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 14:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3653400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epicionly/pseuds/epicionly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Mum, it’s oxfords not brogues, innit?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tick Tick Tock

Eggsy’s a timebomb, no ins or outs about it, and it doesn’t start when he’s five, but his mum starts noticing things after that. He’s strangely quiet the first few months after the funeral, stands at the doorway still waiting for dad like he used to, because Lee always told him when to expect him, and Eggsy’s always loved his father. But in school, he explodes, sends him and another boy and a girl to the headmaster’s office, and leaves the stage a mess. At home, he crawls up the walls, can’t settle in the brief moments before Michelle gathers him up in her arms and he cries.

And the medal: Eggsy won’t let her take it away; he plays with it in his hands for hours on ends, holding it up to the light or slipping it through his fingers, a trick, a speed, all the things that Lee taught him that Eggsy will have to remember now on his own. Eggsy spends days and nights in and out and up and around and too much, too capable of doing and being everything. He’s waiting to explode again, while the moments of calm, effortless tranquility make Michelle uneasy.

 _Make him run off the energy_ , a friend suggests, so Michelle puts him into gymnastics, and that seems to do him right. His coach thinks Eggsy could go Olympic. Michelle thinks Eggsy always could. Her boy’s smart, fast, talented, so full of love, so full of emotion, so extremely one thing or another. Eggsy could do a lot of things.

“Oxfords, not brogues,” he says, one day, and she doesn’t know it then, but he’s started to go in with the wrong crowd, make impulse decisions, been caught with stuff he shouldn’t have, and the next month is when she’ll meet Dean because Eggsy needs a father figure and it’s been so long since she’s felt desirable, and Eggsy? Eggsy’s going to be knee deep in a hell spiraling from other people’s choices. “Mum, it’s oxfords not brogues, innit?”

“Are you going to call?” she asks. The medal’s Eggsy’s through and through. Michelle didn’t want it then, and she doesn’t want it now.

“No.” Eggsy flips the medal in between his fingers and it disappears up his sleeve like a vanishing act. “I don’t need him.” He sits up, swings his legs over the sofa and hops to his feet. Swings his cap on up at an angle and kisses her on the cheek, hand on her shoulder, cheeky, but still her Eggsy. “M’going out, mum.”

And so he does.


End file.
